VCR HORRORS (1987)

Time capsules like these are always amusing and occasionally irritating to revisit. If you came of age in the late '80s and early '90s like I did and grew up watching the titles featured in this exposé, you'll note immediately how wrong-headed much of the talking points are, collected from alarmed parents and so-called experts who are clearly grasping at straws and making points after having seen, at best, five horror films. 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is specifically noted as being one of the first films to introduce the aspect of graphic violence to the horror genre, essentially putting to bed more chaste films like Psycho and Frankenstein. Of course, if you know a single thing about the genre, you'll know that Chain Saw Massacre is actually very low on violence, at least on-screen, and features exactly one chainsaw murder, most of which is left to the imagination. Though these parents admit in the same interview that they had "no idea" how graphic some horror films were until they sat down and watched them specifically for this report, they still managed to rattle off oversimplifications of horror's main thrust, which is "rape and torture," in which most of the victims are females, and that most of the kill scenes have a sexual connotation behind them. I dunno, you tell me: this was the '80s, after all, a time in which the majority of on-screen sexual trysts featured a girl and a boy. You mean to tell me the boyfriends escape the killer while the girlfriends fall victim? Have you seen a slasher movie before?

Though this report does feature notable pro-genre people like Linnea Quigley and critic Chas Balun, both of their collected soundbites are limited to out-of-context blurbs that only support the main thesis. Quigley rattles off every way in which her characters bit the dust in her past movies while Balun just sounds like a mimbo, telling the audience kids want faster and louder horror experiences because of MTV. Good grief.

Refreshingly, the report ends with a level-headed and rational argument for why horror films aren't the scourge of society that most of the talking heads argue and shouldn't be blamed for motivating real-world violence...which comes courtesy of a ten-year-old kid. Go figure.

LEATHERFACE (2017)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series has the oddest trajectory of all the long-running horror franchises. Even during its initial four-movie run from the '70s to the '90s, the sequels' designs were already a little dodgy. During the same era, other slasher franchises like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street had begun following very plain episodic paths: their original movies established their stories and concepts, and all subsequent sequels continued those stories in a mostly fluid manner while recycling actors, characters, or both. Each Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, however, seemed like a mini reset. None of the final girls ever made return appearances, and even members of the Sawyer family killed in previous entries seemed to return for a later sequel or were replaced by very similar characters without explanation. For instance, is "The Hitchhiker" from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, played by Ewin Neal, supposed to be the same character as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's Chop Top, played by Bill Moseley? Because I'm pretty sure that Big Mama tractor trailer made him into mincemeat during the original's finale...unless that was lazily explained by the plate in Chop Top's skull. If we put that aside, who the hell are all the brand new family members in 1990's Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and why do they have their own invalid, comatose grandpa, too? And once those characters are wasted, who the frig are everyone in 1994's accidentally hilarious Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who also have their own invalid, comatose grandpa? I guess one could make the (silly) argument that this particular borough of Texas was inundated with cannibalistic families, but how is it that every single family has, along with their own desiccated grandpa, their own Leatherface as well? Does he just bounce from family to family like some kind of murderous Oliver Twist? 

Even if we put aside all of those complicated mythos and reexamine the series strictly by the various experiences offered by its entries, everything is still all over the place. The first was a landmark horror classic that presented some of the most frenzied and chaotic psychological terror ever levied at a mainstream audience; the second, a Cannon Films-produced black comedy (which I detest); the third, basically a remake of the original, only not as good; and the fourth, an utterly insane direct sequel to the original which starred a pre-fame and totally bonkers Matthew McConaughey and a typically mousy Renee Zellweger; Leatherface was a crossdresser and the murderous Sawyer family had apparently been installed by a shadowy underground operation for the purposes of studying “real horror.” It makes absolutely no sense, all the characters are eccentric as hell (even the teenage victims), and McConaughey’s murderous Vilmer has a remote control for his robotic leg brace. If you haven’t seen it, you should, because it’s a blast. Then came the remake, which was good; the prequel to the remake, which was bad; and Texas Chainsaw 3D, which was a direct sequel to the original (not the remake), somehow included Bill Moseley again, and solidified its place as the worst entry up to that point. Confused yet? 

French directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury burst onto the American horror scene when Dimension Films acquired their home-invasion shocker Inside (À l’intérieur) for distribution. Since then, Dimension owners the Weinsteins (run!) tried to get the duo involved with several of their other horror properties, such as the long-mooted Hellraiser remake and an early iteration of Halloween 2 before Rob Zombie returned to create something slightly better than his remake while still making something pretty terrible. For whatever reason, the duo couldn’t find their footing with either project, but evidently their sloppy seconds (or thirds) known as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series was there to pick up the pieces — hence, we have the succinctly titled Leatherface, which borrows its moniker from the first-round Part 3, and which explores Leatherface's past as...a teenager. 

Sigh. 

A common complaint worth repeating: not everything, or everyone, needs an origin story. Bates Motel, while an entertaining series, spends fifty episodes saying “Norman is crazy.” We know. (And Psycho IV: The Beginning had already done that, and far better,) The Nightmare on Elm Street remake tried to muddy Freddy’s origins by suggesting, maybe, he was framed. (He wasn’t.) And Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween finally answered the burning question we’ve all had about The Shape for 40 years: just WHERE did Michael get his jumpsuit? (A shitting Ken Foree.) What filmmakers and studios fail to realize is that mystique is perfectly fine. We don’t need everything spelled out. Oftentimes, it’s scarier if we don’t know. Though most moviegoers, horror fans or not, would be quick to point out that franchises like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th have more than enough entries already, their popularity never really waned even when their box office receipts began to shrink. Mainstream audiences may have had enough, but horror fans kept that candle burning, consuming each series on home video sequel by sequel. Those franchises have also been around for so long that one sequel after another was no longer enriching the overall mythos, which is why the remakes started, and then the prequels after that, and then the ret-conning sequels that only followed certain original films. This is why Leatherface is the second prequel in the series, coming after 2006’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. 

Saying "what if?" regarding certain horror franchises is all well and good, but the more entries made that shit the bed, the more complicated those franchises become. This sequel counts but this one doesn't, and these never happened and who could possibly keep up? If whoever owns the rights to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series vies for a third prequel, they better call it Leatherbaby so I know where it belongs in the franchise's timeline. (But in all seriousness, maybe a filmmaker can finally step up and make the definitive biopic on serial killer Ed Gein, who inspired not only Leatherface but also Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and Buffalo Bill — how’s that for an origin story?)

The weirdest part of this history-exploring concept is that their filmmakers constantly cite their desire to make the audience "sympathize" with their respective series' boogeymen — with masked maniacs, pedophile dream stalkers, and murderous cannibals.

Open question to these filmmakers: why do you want this from us? IT’S WEIRD. 

Leatherface juggles numerous unlikely inspirations — Of Mice and Men, Mystic River, Badlands — while marrying it to one of the biggest horror franchises in cinema history, and with so much of this going on, it can’t help but make the film feel so different, and by result make the character of Leatherface feel so different, that it’s out of sorts with the rest of the series. The worst entries before this one at least felt like a proper Texas Chainsaw Massacre entry — even the ridiculous McConaughey one, Leatherface's crossdressing propensity notwithstanding.

Leatherface’s biggest fumble is its purposeful design to obscure just which teenaged psycho in the large collection of escaped teenaged psychos is the titular chainsaw-wielder we all know and love. This whole Ten Little Indians-ish, “which troubled youth is Leatherface?” angle is, frankly, stupid, and the film so obviously points to one character in particular as being the infamous cannibal that there's no way your brain would ever allow that to be the case, so when a twist occurs and points to an entirely different character being the titular madman, the viewer looks blankly at the television and says, “No shit.” And once this twist occurs, and you spend the rest of the movie knowing this character is Leatherface, it absolutely robs him of any fear he would go on to inspire in the original. Somehow, he goes from a teen who can think and reason and even empathize to a mute, human-face-wearing mongoloid who communicates by shrieking and wagging his tongue around like a pervert. 

I mean, Leatherface just sucks. 

It’s also incredibly violent. And I can see you rolling your eyes and pushing up your glasses to say, “Well, what did you expect?” and in response I push up my own glasses and nerdily remind you that the original film spilled very little blood, contained very little violence, and, despite its title, contained only one chainsaw murder — the violence of which was left off-screen (so shut it.) 

Leatherface is not cut from the same cloth. It’s very bloody, very violent, and very depraved. If characters being slowly chainsawed apart digit by digit or a psycho girl licking the gooey face of a rotting corpse while having doggie-style trailer sex is your idea of a good time, then have at it, you weirdo. Though, technically, Leatherface is a prequel to the '74 original, it falls more in line with the Platinum Dunes era, thanks to its violent content and admittedly pleasing visual palette, and which were set during the 1970s, anyway. From the get, Leatherface's execution shares very little in common with the stylistic approach and aesthetics of the actual film that inspired it, which was much more of a disturbing, moody cautionary tale and less the maniacal splatterfest the ignorant dismiss it as being. With everything tinged in gold and sepia, some of Leatherface's shot composition is genuinely beautiful at times (that’s where the Badlands influence comes in — Terrence Malick would be so proud), but beauty only gets you so far in any genre, and where the beauty leaves off, the violence and nastiness and goo take over. And speaking of, I hope you like goo! Because you'll get more than your fill here. In Leatherface, sedimentary goo even makes noise. 

There are only two bright spots throughout this catastrophe, which are its competent leads. Lili Taylor (The Conjuring) does strong work as the Sawyer family matriarch, and any project is better for having her. Same said for Stephen Dorff, whose sheriff character easily presents as a man possessed and operating on his own, unlawful agenda. It’s a wonder either of them appear in, essentially, part eight of a long-running slasher franchise, especially one that landed with such a quiet thud. (This was the first Chainsaw in 24 years that didn’t get a wide theatrical release.) 

Had Leatherface been called anything else — Cannibal Run, for instance (I hope you're proud because I just made that up on the spot) — it would offer a reasonable amount of nonsense escapism. It’s well made enough in the gonzo sense, it’s attractively photographed, and the bloodiness and gags will definitely entertain the gorehounds. But most importantly, it wouldn’t be weighed down by those pesky terms “legacy” and “classic” and “iconic,” because as the official backstory of ‘Leatherface’ Sawyer, it feels rote, unwelcome, and just plain wrong.

MOVIE MOMENTS: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986)

"What is your favorite use of a pop song in a horror movie?"

Tobe Hooper’s sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, is one of the most beloved titles in horror history. A daring sequel that completely circumvents expectations, it does not attempt to match the tone or mood of the legendary 1974, overtly horror original. I also hate it. I mean, I just absolutely, positively, have-to-get-my-hatred-there-overnight for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; it’s the equivalent of the original’s disturbing dinner sequence stretched out to an agonizing 90 minutes. It’s important I note this hatred so I can then transition into how much I legitimately love the opening sequence, which sees a couple of rowdy frat boy types finding the wrong end of Leatherface’s blade while Oingo Boingo’s “No One Lives Forever” blares from the kids’ car stereo. 

Before Danny Elfman composed for film, Oingo Boingo was his new wave, somewhat gothy baby, and like his numerous genre film scores, the band leaned on the darkness of life, and the theme of death was found in many of their songs. Its use in this sequence isn’t just ironic, nor just a way of alerting the audience that they’re in for a very different experience when compared to the original, but it’s also just a toe-tapping good time. And, if your time is up, and you’ve gotta go, go with Oingo Boingo

[Reprinted/excerpted from Daily Grinhhouse.]

LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III (1990)

Like a few other horror franchises, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series keeps on truckin’; a new entry is released every few years, with the most recent being 2018's Leatherface (confused yet?). Following the wonderful and visceral original, subsequent entries were all over the place in terms of quality. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1982) and Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994) were completely insane. 2003's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake returned things to respectability, insofar as a Chainsaw movie could be, but the entries that followed, again, got worse and worse.

And meanwhile, sitting quietly in the corner, is 1990’s Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, the most middle-of-the-road film in the series, and the first to be released by a major studio...so you know what that means: studio interference and MPAA ball-breaking. Video editions of the sequel sport the “unrated” cut, restoring some of the grue and gore that was originally shot by director Jeff Burr that was then removed following a battle with the MPAA, although awkward edits that cut away from the violence suggest an even more violent version that has yet to the light of day. Famously, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III features Viggo Mortensen in one of his earliest roles, and he's spoken candidly in the past about his work on the movie as well as its final iteration seen by audiences:

“[Shooting that movie] was fun. I don’t know how many times they sent that to the censors … They kept getting X’s and so they cut so much out that I think the movie is only like 70 minutes long. Unfortunately most of the really funny jokes were associated with gruesome bloodletting of some kind or another.” (Source: Carpe Noctem Magazine). “The movie company got cold feet and cut away the most terrifying and gruesome scenes, and it ended up being a rather incoherent movie.” (Source: M/S Magazine).

Despite Mortensen’s misgivings, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, in its "unrated" form, is a perfectly acceptable entry in the chainsaw-wielding series, though except for adding a pint-sized kid to the Sawyer clan and a survivalist into the mix, it doesn’t try anything new. Burr, however, definitely gets points for casting horror-friendly actors, including William Butler and Jennifer Banko from Friday the 13th: Part VII — The New Blood, Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead, and Mortensen, who at that point had done Renny Harlin’s Prison and the thriller Tripwire. Adding to that, Burr’s level of mayhem and bloody violence is admirable and appreciated, as is the blackest of black humor lifted from the original (and skipped by its sequel in favor of broader stupidity). Where Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III lacks is through its somewhat meandering pace (a LOT of time is spent with our characters wandering around the Texas woods) as well as its closeness to the original’s plot, which prevents it from establishing more of an identity.

Burr follows the “if it ain’t broke” mentality, but by doing so, he’s only further welcoming comparison to Hooper’s seminal original, at which point Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III doesn’t stand a chance. This isn’t necessarily his fault, as original distributor New Line Cinema had acquired the Chainsaw rights from Cannon Films in hopes of softly rebooting the series and creating a new direction where Leatherface would be its prominent boogeyman, similar to their very successful Nightmare on Elm Street series (hence the titular madman being called out in the title). That at least explains why Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III feels like a loose remake, although the dismal box office return put New Line’s plans on the back burner for several years. It’s also a little odd that New Line’s desired to make Leatherface more prominent a la Freddy Krueger, being that he has no more or less screen time here than he did in the original film. By comparison, Mortensen’s “Tex” gets way more to do. (I’m also trying to figure out where all these additional family members keep coming from. Are they actually related to Leatherface, or just a bunch of random Texan psychopaths who somehow found each other in the age before Craigslist? If they’re actual relations, where the hell were they during Dennis Hopper’s duel-chainsaw smackdown at the end of the previous sequel? Were they on vacation, or at mass? How do they multiply? Are they the products of inbreeding? What the hell goes on in the backwoods of Texas, anyway?) (I have to sit down.)

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, despite the obviously tacked on ending, and that its “unrated” form still seems toothless at times, is a decent sequel and worthy of appreciation...only when looking at the other sequels. After seeing how off the rails the series eventually goes, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III might even now be considered a high point — depending on who’s looking.

SLAUGHTER HIGH (1986)

God bless you, the ‘80s slasher. You were very rarely “good,” but man oh man, do you get points for not giving up without a fight. I feel like I say his name an awful lot around these parts, but John Carpenter and his low-budget Halloween paved the way for a long line of slashing imitators that would last for ten plus years (and crop up again in the ‘90s following the Halloween-inspired Scream). But whereas Halloween was good enough to transcend that “slasher” title and be a great film in general, alllllll the imitators that would follow in its wake wouldn’t ever achieve the same bragging rights and would have to be judged entirely within the confines of its own sub-genre, i.e., “______ was good…for a slasher flick.”

And Slaughter High is pretty great for a slasher flick.

Starring Caroline Munro along with a lot of other people you’ve never heard of, Slaughter High is the culmination of some pretty solid horror films to have been unleashed up to that point. Obviously the idea of killing teenagers was popularized by Halloween (even if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had beat it to the punch by four years), but with an opening sequence ripped straight out of Carrie, during which the outcast of a high school is pranked in a sexual manner, leaving the coach to discipline the offenders with grueling exercises, Slaughter High takes these and other inspirations, melds them together, and unleashes them in one formulaic but satisfying bloodbath.

Slaughter High bills itself as a horror/comedy, but minus the opening and closing scenes, there’s nothing particularly comedic about it; it’s actually pretty horrifying. Any sequences having to do with Marty Rantzen, the school’s beleaguered nerd and the target of all the cool kids’ torments, comes off dangerously Troma-esque, but minus those, Slaughter High is fairly straightforward.

As for the quality, well, we can skip saying the acting is bad (it is), that the concept isn’t original (it’s not), and the actors don’t look like teenagers at all during the opening high school prologue (Caroline Munro was 37 at the time and it shows) and get right to what matters: the death scenes. They are wonderful, and with one of Slaughter High’s three(!) directors being a special effects maestro and overseeing only the death scenes, of course they are. Slaughter High boasts some of the best, inventive, and icky death sequences ever seen in the sub-genre. Lawnmowered groins, electric bed sex – forget that a consumer-grade bathtub would never be found in a high school: so long as you fill it with acid and a naked chick, I’m down with it, baby.

The other wonderful aspect to Slaughter High is the score by Harry Manfredini, most famously known for scoring another slasher flick – Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels. Though his music seems more suited for a somewhat darker slasher experience (as the first five Friday flicks were), fans will find it immensely satisfying and even comforting as you see hapless teens barrel down hallways set to his familiar low-string notes.

The very ending of Slaughter High is confusing as fuck and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it seriously doesn’t matter because during Slaughter High someone shotguns a beer can filled with acid and his intestines melt out of his stomach and it’s just the tops.

THE MAD AND THE MACABRE

 

"My family's always been in meat."

LEVITY: THE USUAL SUSPECTS

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre. 

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time. 

Dir. Adam Simon
2000
IFC
United States

“I think there is something about the American Dream…the sort of Disney-esque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white-picket fence, Mom and Dad and their happy children, god-fearing and doing good whenever they can…that sort of expectation, and the flip-side of it – the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter. I think that gives American horror films in some ways kind of an additional rage.”


Horror genre documentaries have become all the rage as of late. Whether they focus on one horror franchise (Crystal Lake Memories; The Psycho Legacy), or one particular sub-genre (Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film), their aim is to break down and scrutinize this thing previously and often described as dark, threatening, unwarranted, unnecessary, and wrong. Horror, the least respected genre of all, is often misunderstood and condemned for the simple fact that sometimes a head gets cut off or a girl is fed to a lawnmower. A critic unwilling to shed his or her self-righteousness couldn’t sit down with a film like The Last House on the Left without dismissing it outright, labeling it pornographic and void of purpose.

This 2000 documentary from filmmaker Adam Simon (also responsible for the Bill Pullman head-scratcher Brain Dead), perhaps the first to openly discuss and celebrate a specific period of the horror genre (the 1960s/70s), might also be the first to let America’s most culturally significant filmmakers explain their thoughts and motivations behind their earlier work. The 1970s, perhaps the last truly celebrated decade of film, saw an uptick not just in quality storytelling, but also in anger, frustration, and sometimes hopelessness. Filmmakers like Frances Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Sydney Lumet, and so many others ran rampant, free from the type of studio constraints that have today become commonplace. And this kind of independent mentality naturally found its way into the horror genre.

Kicking if off was George A. Romero with his antecedent Night of the Living Dead (1968), to be followed by Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within aka Shivers (1975), Romero's Night follow-up Dawn of the Dead (1978), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Supporting these filmmakers’ highlighted bodies of work are director John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), special effects maestro Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), and professional film historians/professors Tom Gunning, Carol J. Glover, and Adam Lowenstein.

Director Adam Simon has not only managed to gather together the modern age’s greatest horror minds for the definitive interview, but he’s also managed to create, hands down, the best examination of modern horror in existence. The previous horror documentaries earlier mentioned are all certainly well made in their own ways, and for the approaches that have been taken, they could certainly be viewed as definitive. But at the end of the day, they are just novelties – impressively expanded versions of IMDB trivia and Fangoria Magazine. Going to Pieces, for instance, is a hell of a lot of fun, and introduced me to films I hadn't previously seen, but beyond that, it doesn't have much to say – certainly not about our culture. It never feels “important” – it never makes the horror films we love feel like anything more than 90 minutes of titillation.

The American Nightmare lets its subjects do all the talking, in their own uncensored, unfiltered, and uncompromising voices. Their words will be tinged in anger, melancholy, and even disbelief. And you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into with the opening of the doc: A scary montage of the films being discussed, intermingled with real news footage of the Vietnam war – of chemical weapons, soldiers with completely brainwashed expressions, and presidents telling us the war is a worthy endeavor. But Vietnam is just one of the several issues discussed here, and whether the inspiring events be damnable (political assassinations, economic collapse) or commendable (the sexual revolution, economic rebirth), all have had their part to play in this collection of high horror cinema watermarks.

"I loved this idea of a revolution… It's a new society devouring the old, and just changing everything."

You all know this one – this story of a group of strangers barricaded inside a Pennsylvania farmhouse as they try to defend themselves from a growing army of the living dead. Since 1968, this concept has been appropriated literally hundreds of times for thousands of films, books, comics, video games, and now television shows – and they all owe it to one man. Shot and released during the height of America’s racial conflict, it had the gall, the audacity (read: the balls) to cast a black actor by the name of Duane Jones, not just prominently, and not just as the lead, but as the hero. And it has perhaps one of the most soul-crushing endings of all time.

Though Romero is quick to dismiss with great modesty anyone's commendation for him for having cast a black man as the lead in his seminal film by simply saying that Jones was the best actor they knew, filmmaker John Landis (interviewed here as a participant, not a subject) recalls having his mind blown at his young seventeen years of age, in awe that he was seeing a black hero on screen during one of the most turbulently racial times not seen since the Civil War. "I just went 'Wow!' because there's this black guy...and he's the lead. The movie was hitting me from all angles."

Complementing NOTLD's footage of lynch mobs assembling with their shotguns, and dogs on leashes barking furiously and pulling men across a field are Lowenstein's thoughts: "[As you watch NOTLD] you can’t not think of lynchings; you can’t not think of freedom marches in the south; you can’t not think of the Civil Rights struggle."

As for the why of it, Romero offers: “Obviously what’s happening in the world creeps into any work. It fits right in, because that’s where the idea comes from – where you get the idea in the first place.”

In a fit of awful irony, insofar as what the film would eventually go on to mean culturally, Romero somberly shares that after having completed the film, he threw it in the trunk, and he and his co-producer took a road trip to New York to try and sell it. On the way there, on the radio, they learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.

“All of a sudden, you really don’t know – it certainly shatters your faith in what’s going on at the top. It really gives you a sense of fragility of things – not just your life, but the nation’s life.”

In the NOTLD sequel of sorts, Dawn of the Dead (also explored in the doc), the character of Fran peers down at a crowd of zombies and asks, "What the hell are they?"  But Romero has the answer this time: "Us. We know we're going to die, right? We're the living dead."

"It just seemed that there was nothing to be trusted in the establishment and everything to be trusted in yourself, and that was the context in which Last House was made." 

 

Likely the most infamous film in Wes Craven’s filmography, The Last House on the Left is an angry, disturbing, and at times vile reinterpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Two young girls on the way to a concert run afoul of three convicts, who proceed to kidnap them and drag them into the woods, where they are then tortured, raped, and unceremoniously killed. Thinking they are free and clear, the convicts, through complete dumb luck, end up at one of their victim's houses, and are then slaughtered one by one by the girl’s revenge-seeking parents. The attack waged against the unsuspecting killers by the dead girl's parents comes close to (and perhaps successfully achieves) a reversing of the protagonists and antagonists roles, presenting a set of parents so bloodthirsty for revenge against their daughter's monstrous killers that they become monsters themselves by film's end.

Craven further explains the film’s tie to Vietnam: "Those kids running down the road, just screaming, naked, after the napalm attack; that was kind of my coming of age to realizing that Americans weren't always the good guys, and that things that we could do could be horrendous and evil and dark and impossible to explain." Examining the film and the young man who had made it, he remarks that it was "made by a man who had a lot more rage than [he] ever realized."

Though the infamous tagline of Last House was the reiterated "it's only a movie..." Lowenstein shares, "What's going on here isn't only a movie. It has everything to do with Kent State, the Vietnam War – that this kind of pain isn't a sick isolated episode. It has everything to do with the world I live in."

This segment is likely the most powerful of the entire documentary, especially after the talking heads somberly recount the war, how they say if you were growing up during that time, you were a veteran of Vietnam whether you were directly involved in the war or not. Even after discussing the film’s inspiration in broad strokes, Craven adds one chilling detail: You will know why he chose to have Krugg execute Marie in such a particular way at the tail end of Last House’s horrific rape scene. It wasn’t just posturing, or what looked good on camera. Instead it was reactionary; it was a real anger transforming into a cinematic one.

Capping off the Vietnam segment of the documentary is a brief but mesmerizing interview with Tom Savini, and there’s really no recounting it. His words are extremely powerful and raw. His remembrance of the awful sights he experienced and captured (as a war photographer) are incredibly difficult to process, but deeply affecting. He explains that, as a child, he would go to see the vintage monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man – and try to recreate them using his effects materials. And so in 1969, in the midst of Vietnam and mere feet away from dead bodies, and as a way to separate him from the reality of the conflict, he would instead study them, and concoct in his head what materials he would use to eventually recreate the piles of the dead around him.

As far as his eventual approach to special effects, he said, "If Vietnam did anything, it was: If it's going to be horrible, then it's going to be horrible the way I saw it. But you will never see it the way I saw it, which is [with] absolute fear; that if someone walks out of the jungle, he wants to kill you. He has a gun and he's going to try."

"My Wisconsin relatives told me about this guy [Ed Gein] that lived about twenty miles from them. [They told me stories of] these human-skin lampshades and I think maybe hearts in the refrigerator...but really the image I came away with, almost my entire life, was there was someone out there making lampshades out of people."

 

Perhaps kicking off the whole “kids in the middle of nowhere who run out of gas” plot device, Tobe Hooper’s Ed-Gein inspired film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though we wish were plucked from someone’s imagination, was instead plucked right out of real life. Borrowing elements of the Gein case, along with a personal anecdote in which a medical colleague of Hooper's once wore a cadaver's face to a Halloween party, scenes from Chain Saw of a van rolling up to an out-of-gas fueling station is meshed with real-life footage of the 1974 gas shortage that occurred in America – of gas station officials and police waving off the lines of cars stretching down the street that were hoping to fill their tanks. How something as innocuous as a lack of gasoline could throw society into such disarray and instability directly compares to these kids whose van runs low on gas and forces them to pull over, thus throwing them into the midst of a cannibalistic nightmare. Normal, middle-class, and pretty kids (and Franklin) soon cross paths with a den of cannibals, starving, out of work, and improvising simply to stay alive.

“I was really scared at that time, and I had to find a way to work that out,” Hooper explains. He goes on to add that his film contains “…the stuff in the darkness, in the shadows, and in particular, the stuff we don't open the door on. And those doors start cracking open a bit, because you're forcing them open with images that really blow into the nightmare zone."

And he's very correct. Chains Saw feels more like a nightmare than any of the other films. Its documentary approach gives it the appearance of a well-staged snuff film, where a "real" family of cannibal deviants pray on and decimate a group of kids one at a time. The film takes the elements borrowed from real life and combines it with the anecdote in the next paragraph, and what we end up with is not just a seminal film or the beginning of a still-going-strong franchise, but about the collision of social classes bathed in the blood of middle-class kids traipsing where they ought not be traipsing. Still relevant today due to the current economic climate, it's easy to forget that a lack of good, high-paying jobs affects everyone, from the well-to-do rich right down to the lower class cannibals who rob graveyards late at night and dwell somewhere within the bowels of Texas.

Hooper’s interview segment ends with him explaining, "Mothra didn't scare me. Godzilla didn't scare me. It's people I'm afraid of." Hearing this, following the genesis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – in which he was at a Montgomery Ward’s hardware department store and slowly being surrounded by more and more shoppers, finding himself standing directly in front of a rack of chainsaws…and realizing, if he really wanted to get out of there, he knew he’d found a way – becomes deeply unsettling. That “normal” people have thoughts like these is scary enough…but there are people out there who don’t have the mental capacity or the emotional barriers to make them realize that doing something like that would be wrong. So you take that, and then take away their job stability and their right to make a home for themselves, then disaster can happen. “It’s people I’m afraid of,” indeed.

"That seemed to be where we were then, in the '70s. It was a different decade, it was a different time. Beginnings of prosperity. Major crises seemed to be over, and everyone was just dancing away."

 

On the run from a chaotic and bloody Philadelphia, four individuals from different walks of life somehow come together, commandeer (steal) a chopper, and get the hell out of dodge as the city burns behind them. They soon find themselves at a shopping mall, originally only stopping to find fuel and regroup until they can come up with a plan. But the longer they rest there, the quicker they realize they're sitting on a potential bounty of every necessity, and every comfort and convenience, they could ever need or want: gourmet food, top-of-the-line electronics, the finest fashion and jewelry – even an arcade! With one member among them pregnant and all of them exhausted, it seems like the most obvious choice to make. The plan is simple: Bed down, fortify a living area, and then clean-house, ridding the mall of the walking dead threat and securing every entrance. But, what begins as simple survival soon devolves into a life of opulence, and when danger comes their way – in the form of both looters as well as zombies – they refuse to give it up.

I've been to one public and several private screenings of the original Dawn of the Dead, and without fail, every time our survivors fly over Monroeville Mall and say, "It's one of those shopping centers; one of those big indoor malls," it always gets a laugh. And that laugh signifies: "Well, no shit – of course it's a mall." What the people who react that way don't realize is that, yes, granted, malls are part of every day culture now and have been for decades, but they were a new phenomenon in the late 1970s. During this time, the reign of mom-and-pop shops and corner stores had begun their decline in popularity while huge corporations moved in and constructed gigantic monstrosities filled with every specialty store you could imagine. What we take for granted as always having been part of American culture was a newborn back during Romero's second zombie film, which many would argue is his masterpiece.

"My zombies have gotten a taste of McDonalds and the good things in life," Romero notes with a grin. "And they can't figure out why it's not happening anymore. They're just sort of lost souls."

The materialism and consumerism aspects of Dawn of the Dead have been discussed ad nauseum over the years, by Romero et al. as well as film critics and film fans. While The American Nightmare's discussion of it is brief, it is discussed perhaps with the most openness from Romero that I have seen yet.

He sums it up rather well:

"Domesticity is not what it's cracked up to be and having all that 'stuff' winds up meaning nothing. There's always that underlining realization of how synthetic this is. 'I have this and that'...without thinking much beyond that."

"There really was [a sexual revolution]. The '60s were unprecedented in terms of openness and experimentation, and it was always political. The sex that you were engaging in had strong political overtones... Sex had meaning beyond sex... beyond the physical realm."

  

A Dr. Frankensteinian scientist is out to prove that humanity has lost its instinct, and so he begins a series of experiments in which he purposely applies a parasite of sorts into willing living hosts in hopes that the afflicted will begin acting on impulse rather than their rationale. The test patients' sexuality is suddenly awakened with an animalistic fury, leaving them acting strictly on impulse. Soon a sex plague of sorts begins to spread and it threatens to tear down society as a whole. In continuing with the Frankenstein theme, the scientist's experiment is ironically and unfortunately a success.

It's strange to think that the sexual revolution of the '60s, which continued into the '70s, actually took place in this, our country. Founded on this artificial ideal about wanting to live free of oppression, and with the freedom to pursue our own religious beliefs, our country has been terrified of sex since we first set foot on this continent. Funny, since we use sex to sell every imaginable product, service, food, or anything else you can think of. Sex sells films, television shows, books, music, make-up, underarm deodorant, and yep, even kids' clothes. Further, it's perhaps not widely known that John F. Kennedy's win over Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election is attributed to the nation's first ever televised presidential debate, and the American people got their first mass glimpse of the handsome and distinguished Kennedy versus the sweaty Nixon. But when it comes to our own sex – something private, shared between two consenting adults, it suddenly becomes a dangerous and ugly thing. Homosexuality, sodomy, polygamy – these things are suddenly looked down on, preached against, and even outlawed.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to attack this hypocrisy head-on with his first wide-release film, They Came From Within, in which he turns sexuality into an inescapable tangible and intangible force:

I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully. 

While showing real footage from feminist and political rallies, angered verbal prose on abortion rights, as well as scenes from Cronenberg's infamous "body horror" portions of his filmography (They Came From Within, Videodrome, Rabid, The Brood), Cronenberg explains, "Biology is a course destiny... From beginning to end, biology is destiny. But it's a very human thing to want to derail destiny. Therefore it's a very human thing for us to want to derail biology. And many of my characters are in the process of trying to derail biology in order to derail their destiny as well."

Perhaps most tellingly, Cronenberg states that his own personal goal for They Came From Within was not only to avoid filtering out his ambivalence about his belief system that inspired the film, but to let that guide its events. He states that he believes things can be both dangerous and wonderful at the same time, disgusting and beautiful at the same time. Therefore, it's only appropriate that the parasite in the film that spreads from host to host is both an aphrodisiac...and a venereal disease.

Cronenberg says, "I, on a very very basic level, am afraid of revolution. I don't want to have to experience that. And yet I recognize that there are times when those things are absolutely necessary, because there's no other way to change things."

"My father came up to me and said, 'Look, if you hear the [air raid] sirens, I want you to go down this museum building into the basement. And if you see a flash or something, cover yourself up.'"

 

Halloween night, 1963. The parents are away, the little brother's supposedly out trick-or-treating, and the big sister is sneaking a quickie with her even quicker boyfriend. Someone, you – the audience – sneaks alongside the house, in through the back door, grabs a knife from a drawer, climbs a set of stairs, slips on a clown mask, and stabs that big sister to death. You hurry back down the stairs and out the front door, when you're accosted by the big sister's parents. You, the audience, the killer, are a six-year-old boy. You've just murdered your own sister, and no one will ever know why.

Halloween has long been thought of as the ultimate morality tale. John Carpenter's second film, shot independently, went on to make back its budget nearly 150 times. It created a sub-genre, kick-started the idea of the movie maniac, and established all the rules that are still adhered to in films today. Fuck and die, drink/do drugs and die. If you're the virginal type who prefers schoolbooks and quiet nights to sexual escapades and reckless teen behavior, you might not only survive, but perhaps help put an end to a Halloween night of terror created by that masked man Michael Myers.

This segment of The American Nightmare, and the last film to be discussed, eschews cultural and societal discussion in favor of a psychological one. After all, in all the other films discussed previously, each had its own political inspiration for existing – each came about as a reaction to something awful occuring in our world. Therefore it's only appropriate that Halloween – the most innocent film in the bunch – does the heavy lifting of explaining the why. Why do we like to be scared? Why do we come for this? What can be derived from seeing the innocent (and not so innocent) torn apart, vivisected, their life ended with a thick blanket of red stuff?

"People often say a horror movie is a roller coaster ride," Professor Carol J. Glover questions, "but what is a roller coaster ride?"

Professor Tom Gunning might have the answer, equating an audience's entertainment by a horror film to a protective membrane – something we use to screen out the real horrors of the world. If we invest ourselves in terror on the silver screen, it helps us to deal with the actual terrors that await us on city streets, suburban backyards, or in our own homes.

This was never more relevant than during the 1950s, when our filmmakers were just kids, trying to eke out a life in this nasty world bequeathed to them by their parents. And ironically, they were more scared than the audiences whom they would soon terrify with their bodies of work – a direct result from a period of international unrest known as the Cold War.

"There was a sense that we weren't going to make it," Carpenter remembers."There was a sense that all of us were going to die in atomic war."

"Every fourth Friday – every Friday of the month – we heard the air raid sirens," Landis adds. "And we did drop drills. We were told 'face away from the glass.'"

"If the bomb falls in the center of Manhattan, here's complete devastation, here's partial devastation, and here was radiation poisoning," Romero recalls, using his hands to emphasize how glibly the different devastation zones were discussed back then. "I think we were somewhere in the partial devastation zone."

"I started asking my mother and father, 'Is the world going to come to an end?'" Hooper recalls. "I didn't know if death was going to fall from the skies at any time."

So, after all has been said and done, why horror films? Why present these terrible ideas and images to audiences? Why challenge them and scare them, especially in a world that needs no help in causing fear and helplessness?

"[Horror films are] boot camps for the psyche," says Craven. "It's strengthening [kids'] egos and strengthening their fortitude... That's something the parents never seem to think about... Even if [the films] are giving them nightmares, there's something there that's needed."

WHAT A CONCEPT

I didn't catch Texas Chainsaw 3D when it was in theaters. Based on the surprising success it enjoyed at the box office, I guess I'm one of the few who opted to stay home and...watch something better. The promise of seeing a Chainsaw film directed by the guy who made Takers, produced by the guys who made multiple Saws, and starring a rapper named Trey Songz didn't exactly lure me into theater lobbies to slap my hard earned cash down on the counter.

Look, I can sit here and pretend to be better and above it all, but I know I'll be checking it out when it hits Redbox, so I'll stow my pompousness for the time being.

Strictly by happenstance I stumbled across this very cool concept art by artist Jerad Marantz (I Am Legend, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Because I haven't seen the film, I have no idea in what context these images might have been used, but I find the idea of an older, grayer Leatherface intriguing: 

Source.

Jerad's Other Stuff.

SHITTY FLICKS: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

Usually it takes until the eighth chapter of any infamous horror franchise to be downright ridiculously and absurdly bad. Your lead antagonist can suddenly do anything, whether it's take Manhattan, appear in a webcam show broadcasting within their old home, or even haunt a website, or something.

We lucked out with this one, however. While it is only the fourth entry in the long running Leatherface saga - a sequel/re-imagining of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellwegger - it's so insane that even Ed Gein was quoted has having said, "Jesus, I used to fry vaginas like eggs and even I'm weirded out."

So, okay - Chainsaw 4 starring two competent actors. What could go wrong?

Everything. Or nothing. It depends on how shitty your taste is.

It's prom night! The movie hasn’t even tried to suck yet, and it already does, setting its series of events on the most over-used night of terror of all time, even more so than those random unlucky Fridays.

Mousey Jenny (Renée Zellwegger) hastily applies her make-up before being carted off to the prom by her equally flavorless date. The two have their pictures taken, as the now-famous picture-taking sound effects used so effectively during the opening of the original movie are layered over the scene.

Upon arriving, there is almost instant drama: Jenny’s good buddy, Heather, has misplaced her boyfriend, Barry.

Oh, there he is: necking with a girl that’s not Heather. In response, Heather flips out and steals Barry’s car, which she drives around the parking lot before he catches up and climbs in.

“Guys need sex. If we don’t get it, you can get ‘prostrate’ cancer,” he claims. Luckily, mousey Jenny, who was in the back seat the whole time with her date, pipes up:

“That’s not true.”

During this scene, we learn so much exposition about everyone that it’d be easier to just take notes:

Jenny is quiet, plain, and sexually repressed. She does not have much of a social life, unless she is with her plain date, Sean.

Heather is really, really, dumb, and while seemingly a floozy, will not have sex with Barry. Heather routinely says dumb things, like “I just thought of something so cool. What if we got into a wreck and crashed into a car in front of us and we all died? They could write a song about it.”

Barry is the biggest asshole in the world. Literally. And when Heather says things, he says, “Shut up.”

Sean and Barry used to be friends when they were little, until Barry got “too cool” aka too huge an asshole. Sean is also a pothead.

That’s about it for development.

Gary, the prom night photographer, specialized in bringing out each couple's raw emotions.

The kids continue to drive, even though it’s painfully obvious there is no destination. At no point does anyone ask, “Where are we going?” or “Can we turn around and go home/back to the prom/to somewhere with lights and paved roads?”

“There’s no place to turn around, there’s NEVER a place to turn around, THIS SUCKS,” oozes Barry, insinuating he’s caught in this kind of predicament every night.

By the time someone does come up with the genius idea of leaving the area, another car comes out of nowhere and smashes into them.

“I’m not hurt,” says the other driver, and then falls down, hurt. 

Jenny begins the hike to find some help along with Heather and Barry, leaving Sean at the wreck to wait for…something.

The kids stumble into a small office hosted by Darla, a dumb secretary, and the following bewildering dialogue takes place:

Heather: [concerned] Call the police. There’s been a horrible accident. A man is dying!

Darla: [overjoyed] Prom night!

Heather: [mindlessly] Someone bring me a glass of water, please?

Darla tries to call someone named Vilmer, and when she catches Jenny looking at her allegedly large breasts (we’re never given an establishing shot, which is something people called “directors” usually do), she coos, “phony as three dollar bills!”

Why is there such a lack of care for anyone or anything in this weird alternate universe known as Texas?

Darla continues to talk about her breasts as she waits for Vilmer to answer the phone. He eventually does, and she gives him directions on where to find the wreck and the dying kid. Then she hangs up and immediately asks, “Why do blondes stick their heads out of car windows?”

No, seriously—what is this? What is going on?

Why doesn’t she care about the dying kid?

Why don’t these kids care that Darla doesn’t care about the dying kid?

Why do the kids ALL LAUGH TOGETHER when Heather doesn’t get the joke?

Why would this film’s director go out of his way to “re-aimagine” the first Chainsaw film as a stupid, stupid, stupid movie?

Before anyone knows what to do next, a rock flies through the window, which Darla blames on “some farmer’s wife.” She rushes to the window and yells at the vandalizers:

“Read ‘em and weep!”

And we finally see those breasts; bare, glorious, and brandished in the night.

Back with Sean, Vilmer shows up to assess the situation. Oh, Matthew McConaughey. It’s about time. This movie needs a new kind of insanity.

Vilmer checks the boy, says he’s dead, stares hard at Sean when the boy who denies Vilmer’s diagnosis, and then promptly snaps the boy’s neck.

“He’s dead now!”

Oh, Vilmer.

Sean flees in terror as Vilmer looks disappointed. Vilmer easily catches up in his truck.

“Please mister, you’re scaring me!” Sean cries. He attempts to flee again, but Vilmer effortlessly runs him down with his truck. He puts on a cassette tape of rock and then rolls back and forth over the boy as I guess we're horrified? Or amused?

Something.

Meanwhile, Heather and Barry chase down a passing car to get some help, which Jenny refuses to do, citing the possibility of getting arrested for trespassing. Arrested by police officers. That would suck, right? Especially when you’re trying to find some.

We’re twenty minutes in, and I’m already exhausted.

Jenny continues on the road by her lonesome, her only company a flashlight. A bag flies in her face and she gets scared.

Hey Jenny, might you spare some bag so I can end my life?

Heather and Barry find an old farmhouse, and they knock on the door intending to ask for a ride. When no one answers, Barry goes around back as Heather sits her not-so-bright ass on the front porch swing.

A dark, hulking figure in an apron shows up and starts touching Heather’s hair from behind. After a few rounds of this, Heather turns and sees the toucher: Leatherface!

Heather does a round of the usual shrieking and tries to flee, but Leatherface grabs her and stuffs her in a freezer inside the house.

And guess who doesn’t lock that freezer?

Leatherface.

Heather bursts out almost immediately, and Leatherface freaks out and stuffs her back in.

Thanks for that scene.

During all this, Barry has run afoul of his own nemesis: a shotgun toting, famous quote-spewing redneck. Barry tries to lie his way out of being killed and it barely works. He locks the redneck out of his own house and wanders around inside, searching for Heather, not the least bit concerned someone is trying to shoot him.

Thankfully, Leatherface is still inside and easily dispatches Barry with his big awesome hammer. Heather also takes this opportunity to free herself from the freezer, AGAIN, but Leatherface picks her up and plops her on a meat hook.

Oh no, the end of Heather!

No, wait—it’s not. She’ll be back. Again and again.

Vilmer picks up Jenny by the side of the road under the guise of giving her a lift to help. He starts harassing her almost immediately. The two exchange completely unrealistic dialogue before Jenny sees Sean’s body in the back seat and throws herself out of the truck. Another truck/foot race takes place until Vilmer cackles and leaves her behind, telling her to “live and learn.”

"I HAVE IDEA-AAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"

Leatherface pops out of nowhere with his chainsaw and a chase begins. Jenny runs until she finds the farmhouse, running inside and procuring a gun from a dead cop before throwing herself from the top window onto the roof. Leatherface follows, and Jenny smartly climbs to the top of the TV antenna.

One quick swipe from the chainsaw makes short work of the antenna and Jenny plummets to the ground, which she deserves.

And everything is suddenly quiet.

No chainsaw, no shrieking man child, no nothing.

Oh wait, there he is.

More running, more screaming, more revving of saws.

Jenny finds herself back at Darla’s office, and Darla calls good old W.E. to come pick her up. W.E. shows up pretty quickly with a sack in which to stuff Jenny.

So, wait... Was Darla being an antagonist supposed to be shocking? Because the movie sure wants you to think that.

W.E. stuffs Jenny in the sack, hits her with a stick, and then tazers her.

“I’m going to pick up pizza,” Darla says, and leaves.

In the drive-in line, Darla flirts with the window guy, all the while Jenny screams inside her drunk.

“What’s that?” asks the window guy.

“Wanna come see?” Darla asks, popping the trunk.

“No thanks,” says window guy.

Jesus Christ.

CHAINSAW DANCE PARTY!!

On the way home, Darla sees Heather in the middle of the road.

How’d she get off the hook, you ask?

Beats me.

Beats Heather, too. Darla does, that is. Very, very, very lightly. With a stick. Until Heather asks her to stop.

Darla relents, acting as if she actually cares.

“Don’t go crawlin’ off,” she reasons, and then fucking just leaves her in the road, not at all worried that someone else might come along and find her and have her and her whole screaming family arrested and tried for murder.

Darla makes it home, and Leatherface, dressed as an old woman, bursts out of the front door being zapped by W.E. Leatherface gathers up the Jenny sack and carries her inside.

Jenny and Vilmer are finally officially introduced.

Vilmer goes out for a bit, but then comes back with Heather. Yep, she’s still alive! He smashes her face and down she goes. Again.

And again, she continues to be alive.

Darla takes Jenny to clean her up a bit, and then regales her with the “people” that Vilmer works for: a team of shadowy, Big Brother-type people who monitor certain situations for God knows what reason. They also killed Kennedy.

Are you terrified?

Darla bursts in and catches Vilmer about to molest Jenny, and a huge fight ensues. Jenny takes this time to procure a large shotgun. Everyone lies down on the floor except for Vilmer, who unzips his shirt and dares her to shoot, in order to prove he’s really as insane as it’s pretty apparent he is. Then he steps on Darla’s throat, because whatever. Why not? His remote-controlled leg braces give him the feet force of a cyborg, and Darla begins to freak out. During this, Jenny tries to gather up Heather, but she’s too dumb and hurt to move.

Jenny flees and Vilmer follows close behind, jumping on the roof of her getaway car. Jenny crashes and Vilmer gathers his prize. Again. And around and around we go.

Meanwhile, Leatherface dresses up like his idea of an attractive woman, as Darla and Vilmer have a frantic, dirty-looking make-out session in the kitchen. Darla snatches one of Vilmer’s leg remotes and uses it against him, which I guess really turns him on. (Get it?)

Later, everyone gathers together, and they sit down to have some dinner. I think we all know where this is heading: a re-enactment of the original film’s genuinely disturbing dinner table scene, only this time with the guy from Fool's Gold.

Jenny flips out and yells at Vilmer, who strikes W.E. in the head for no reason. The previously-vegetative grandpa gets up and leaves the table.

Can I come where you’re going, gramps?

John Carpenter couldn't believe he got out of bed for this.

Vilmer sets Heather on fire and throws her against the wall and everyone starts screaming.

But she’s still alive.

Just before dinner gets to be too awkward, Rothman, the shadowy, Big Brother-type man Darla had talked, about shows up. This Jon Favreau-looking man disciplines Vilmer, telling him that he “wants people to know the meaning of horror.”

Why?

Who knows?

Rothman begins licking Jenny’s face and showing her his stomach that appears to have a patchwork of self-imposed scars and piercings. He leaves, and Vilmer crushes Heather’s head with his robofoot.

And she’s actually dead now.

He takes out his trusty razor and begins slicing up his own body as Leatherface screams and Darla begs him to stop.

Screaming and screaming everyone is doing. And I am, too. For mercy.

Jenny escapes as Leatherface, who really has had shit to do in this movie, follows close behind. 

"Get her, Leather!” screams Vilmer before screaming his own name.

Enter the Spottishes, the best part of this movie!

Mr. and Mrs. Spottish, a delightful elderly couple in their RV, are enjoying a nice drive. Jenny, still fleeing from Leatherface, ends up running right across their path in the road.

“There’s a monster chasing her with a chainsaw!” Mrs. Spottish shouts, pulling Jenny on board. “Step on it, Mr. Spottish!” (The best line in cinema history.)

Vilmer then shows up in his trusty truck with Leatherface swinging his chainsaw at the RV until the drivers freak out and flip their vehicle. Jenny escapes from the wreck unscathed and flees across a field. A nearby crop-dusting plane figures it’ll intervene and dive-bombs Vilmer, giving him a good chop with its propeller. 

Leatherface begins shrieking like a little bitch as Jenny hops into Rothman’s suddenly-appearing limo.

Rothman begins to apologize for his failed “spiritual experience” and peppers it with random French bullshit.

“Fuck you,” Jenny says, as weakly as I feel.

At the hospital, a police officer (‘Grandpa’ from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre) asks Jenny several questions while a fat orderly (Franklin from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre) wheels a gurney by with a crazy woman (Sally from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre) strapped to it.

See? Because the guy who actually brought you this atrocity WROTE the original film, which is groundbreaking, terrifying, and a genuine classic. So I guess The Next Generation is good, too, for that reason. You know, by default.

Right?